January 2012 fourth warmest for contiguous United States: Alaska extremely cold

This monthly analysis from NOAA is part of the suite of climate services we provide government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.

The average contiguous U.S. temperature in January was 36.3 degrees F, 5.5 degrees F above the 1901-2000 long-term average -- the fourth warmest January on record, and the warmest since 2006. Precipitation, averaged across the nation, was 1.85 inches. This was 0.37 inch below the long-term average, with variability between regions.

U.S. Climate Highlights -- January

• Warmer-than-average temperatures were widespread across the contiguous United States during January. Nine states -- Arizona, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming -- had January temperatures ranking among their ten warmest. Florida and Washington were the only states with temperatures near average, and no state was cooler than average.
• Many locations across the Northern Plains exceeded all-time warm January maximum temperatures records during the month, including Minot, North Dakota, which reached 61 degrees F on January 5th. This surpassed the previous record of 59.0 degrees F for the city, set on January 28th, 1906.
• In contrast to the contiguous United States being much warmer than average, several towns across Alaska had their coldest average January temperatures on record -- Nome (-16.6 degrees F), Bethel (-17.3 degrees F) McGrath (-28.5 degrees F), and Bettles (-35.6 degrees F).
• Precipitation totals were mixed across the United States during January. The Southern Plains and the Great Lakes were wetter than average for the month, with Texas having above-average precipitation for the second month in a row. Texas had not experienced two consecutive months with above-average precipitation since January-February 2010.
• Below-average precipitation was observed for the Central Plains, where Kansas had its third driest January, and Nebraska its eighth. The Southeast was also drier than average, where Florida had its eighth driest January on record. Many locations along Florida's Atlantic coast, which usually averages over 2.5 inches of precipitation during January, had little to no precipitation during the month.
• Cities across the Northern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast had below-average snow fall during the month -- a result of warmer and drier than average conditions. According to data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the average snow extent during January was 1.0 million square miles, which was 329,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average. This marks the 3rd smallest January snow cover extent in the 46-year period of record.

U.S. Climate Highlights -- Winter to Date (December 2011-January 2012)

• The first two months of the winter season, December and January, have been much warmer than average for the contiguous United States. The two-month period was the fourth warmest on record with an average temperature 3.8 degrees F above average. Much of the warmth was anchored across the northern and eastern United States. Minnesota was record warm for the period, with an average temperature 10.1 degrees F above average. A total of twenty-two states from Montana to Maine had December-January temperatures ranking among their ten warmest.
• Despite a large winter storm which impacted the western U.S. during January, much of the region was drier than average. California had its fourth driest December-January period, and Montana had its sixth. Wetter-than-average conditions were observed in a string of states from New Mexico to New York, with Texas having its eleventh wettest two-month period.

U.S. Climate Highlights -- Last 12 months (February 2011-January 2012)

• The 12-month period, ending in January, was the sixth warmest such period for the contiguous United States, with warmer-than-average temperatures dominating the eastern two-thirds of the nation. Seven states -- Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia -- were record warm for the period, while an additional 18 states had 12-month temperatures ranking among their ten warmest. Oregon and Washington were the only states with below-average temperatures during the period.
• The nationally-averaged precipitation total for the 12-month period was near average, masking regional extremes. The Ohio Valley and Northeast were record wet for the period, with seven states within those regions also being record wet. Dry conditions were present along the southern tier of the nation from New Mexico to South Carolina.

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Materials for first optical fibers with high-speed electronic function are developed

The international team, led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, will publish its findings in the journal Nature Photonics.

Badding explained that one of the greatest current technological challenges is exchanging information between optics and electronics rapidly and efficiently. Existing technology has resulted in sometimes-clumsy ways of merging optical fibers with electronic chips -- silicon-based integrated circuits that serve as the building blocks for most semiconductor electronic devices such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), computers, and cell phones. "The optical fiber is usually a passive medium that simply transports light, while the chip is the piece that performs the electrical part of the equation," Badding said. "For example, light is transmitted from London to New York via fiber-optic cables when two people set up a video call on their computers. But the computer screens and associated electronic devices have to take that light and convert it to an image, which is an electrical process. Light and electricity are working in concert in a process called an OEO conversion, or an optical-electrical-optical conversion." Badding said that, ideally, rather than coupling the optical fiber to the chip, as is routine in existing technology, a "smart fiber" would have the electronic functions already built in.

The integration of optical fibers and chips is difficult for many reasons. First, fibers are round and cylindrical, while chips are flat, so simply shaping the connection between the two is a challenge. Another challenge is the alignment of pieces that are so small. "An optical fiber is 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair. On top of that, there are light-guiding pathways that are built onto chips that are even smaller than the fibers by as much as 100 times," Badding said. "So imagine just trying to line those two devices up. That feat is a big challenge for today's technology."

To address these challenges, the team members took a different approach. Rather than merge a flat chip with a round optical fiber, they found a way to build a new kind of optical fiber with its own integrated electronic component, thereby bypassing the need to integrate fiber-optics onto a chip. To do this, they used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials directly, layer by layer, into tiny holes in optical fibers. "The big breakthrough here is that we don't need the whole chip as part of the finished product. We have managed to build the junction -- the active boundary where all the electronic action takes place -- right into the fiber," said Pier J. A. Sazio of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and one of the team's leaders. "Moreover, while conventional chip fabrication requires multimillion-dollar clean-room facilities, our process can be performed with simple equipment that costs much less."

Sazio added that one of the key goals of research in this field is to create a fast, all-fiber network. "If the signal never leaves the fiber, then it is a faster, cheaper, and more efficient technology," said Sazio. "Moving technology off the chip and directly onto the fiber, which is the more-natural place for light, opens up the potential for embedded semiconductors to carry optoelectronic applications to the next level. At present, you still have electrical switching at both ends of the optical fiber. If we can actually generate signals inside a fiber, a whole range of optoelectronic applications becomes possible."

The research also has many potential non-telecommunications applications. "For example, our work also represents a very different approach to fabricating semiconductor junctions that we are investigating for solar-cell applications," said Badding.

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SIA makes public technology roadmap

SAN FRANCISCO--The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has made public its 2011 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). , first presented in Incheon, Korea on December 14, 2011. Sponsored by Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, the report is overseen by the SIA, the voice of America’s semiconductor manufacturing industry.

Dealing with both near and long-term challenges as well as potential innovations, the roadmap lays out what it sees as the path for semiconductor design and manufacturing through 2026.

The aim in looking so far ahead, said the SIA, is to anticipate technical challenges well in advance, giving the industry and research community time to dedicate resources to overcoming them.

One of those key challenges, said SIA president Brian Toohey, was keeping pace with Moore’s Law, and how to continue decreasing the size of semiconductors while increasing performance standards to meet consumer demands.



SIA makes public technology roadmap

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Discovery uses 'fracture putty' to repair broken bone in days

"Complex fractures are a major cause of amputation of limbs for U.S. military men and women," said Steve Stice, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, animal and dairy scientist in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and director of the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center.

"For many young soldiers, their mental health becomes a real issue when they are confined to a bed for three to six months after an injury," he said. "This discovery may allow them to be up and moving as fast as days afterward."

Stice is working with Dr. John Peroni to develop a fast bone healing process. "This process addresses both human and veterinary orthopedic needs," said Peroni, an associate professor of large animal surgery in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the RBC.

Peroni and Stice are leading a large animal research project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project includes scientists and surgeons from the Baylor University College of Medicine, Rice University and the University of Texas, who conducted the early studies.

Engineering new bone

"Healing of critical-size defects is a major challenge to the orthopedic research community," Peroni said. "Large-bone defects must be stabilized and necessitate technologies that induce rapid bone formation in order to replace the missing tissue and allow the individual to return to rapid function. To date, no single material can suffice."

The group they lead is a multidiscipline and multi-institutional group actively working on bone tissue engineering.

"Our group has been working productively together on numerous projects through the last several years," Stice said, "So, a collegial relationship and successful collaborative working relationship is already established."

Between 2009 and 2011, the collaborations received a $1.4 million grant from the DOD for the use of stem cells in fracture healing to be tested in sheep.

"In our experiences with large animal models, following the guidelines established by our animal care and use committee," Stice said, "we have been successful in formulating a product that contains mesenchymal stem cells and allows them to survive in the environment of the fracture long enough to elicit the rapid formation of new bone."

This year, the group showed bone can be generated in sheep in less than four weeks. The speed in which bone is formed is one of the truly unique features of this study.

Fracture putty

To start the bone regeneration process, the RBC used adult stem cells that produce a protein involved in bone healing and generation. They then incorporated them into a gel, combining the healing properties into something Stice calls "fracture putty."

With Peroni's assistance, the Houston-based team used a stabilizing device and inserted putty into fractures in rats. Video of the healed animals at two weeks shows the rats running around and standing on their hind legs with no evidence of injury. The RBC researchers are testing the material in pigs and sheep, too.

"The small-animal work has progressed, and we are making good progress in large animals," he said.

More work is needed to get to human medical trials, but the threat of losing federal funding for biomedical work through the DOD means they will have to find new ways to fund the project.

Next steps

"The next step is to show that we can rapidly and consistently heal fractures in a large animal," Peroni said, "then to convert it to clinical cases in the UGA [College of Veterinary Medicine] clinics where clinicians treat animals with complex fractures all the time."

Once they have something that works for animals, it will be passed over to the DOD for human use.

Peroni, who is chairman of the North American Veterinary Regenerative Medicine Association, is hopeful this material will be promoted to the veterinary and human medical fields through the educational efforts of NAVRMA and the RBC.

However, the RBC isn't the only group working on a faster fix for broken bones.

"Our approach is biological with the putty," Stice said. "Other groups are looking at polymers and engineering approaches like implants and replacements which may eventually be combined with our approach. We are looking at other applications, too, using this gel, or putty, to improve spinal fusion outcomes."

One of the best hopes for the fracture putty is in possible facial cranial replacements, an injury often seen on the battlefield.

The project ends in mid-2012. "By then we are to deliver the system to the DOD," Stice said.

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India wafer fab decision expected by end of 2012

BANGALORE, India—Details of the proposed semiconductor wafer fab to be set up in India are set to be announced by the end of the year at the latest, with talks between the federal government and interested companies getting down to brass tacks.

"The last time the government announced its scheme to have a wafer fabrication plant in India, well, it did not happen," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state for communications and information technology.

Pilot said India's government is more flexible than it had been a few years ago, when a government-backed scheme to locate a chip fab in India failed. "We are far more willing to meet [a potential investor] halfway down the line," Pilot said. Pilot said the government is currently discussing what technology node an Indian wafer fab would be capable of and how long that technology is likely to remain relevant.

Speaking at the India Semiconductor Association’s (ISA) annual summit, Pilot said a decision will likely be made in the next few months, and at the latest, by the year-end.

India's government has said it plans to locate a wafer fab in the country and that the fab would be the beginning of a chip manufacturing ecosystem in India.

"The government will answer this problem by investing in and do whatever else is needed for a fab," said R. Chandrashekhar, secretary of India's Department of Information Technology. "Significant progress has been made in our talks with potential contenders."

Chandrashekhar said India's imminent National Electronics Policy would address the possibility that imports of electronic components and products would overtake the amount spent on petroleum imports within a decade.

The seventh annual summit of the ISA, like the first one, is grappling with the issue of a lack of an electronics manufacturing ecosystem in the country. Speaking at the summit, Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of EDA and IP vendor Synopsys Inc., said the question of whether India should have electronics manufacturing would be somewhat addressed due to the success of the Akash tablet, the low-cost, Android-based tablet designed by U.K. firm Datawind and built by India-based Quanta, which is distributed to Indian college students and sold commercially at a subsidized price.

"This brings up the question of electronics manufacturing—power availability, distribution, Wi-Fi access, software, fabless semiconductor design—and India must decide which areas it wants to differentiate itself in before spending billions on a fab," de Geus said. "The [pent-up] demand for the tablet computer begs the question of manufacturing in India."

India wafer fab decision expected by end of 2012

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Mindspeed completes acquisition of Picochip

Mindspeed Technologies, a supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of privately held, U.K.-based Picochip.

Picochip is a supplier of integrated system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for small cell base stations. Picochip pioneered the femtocell market and has developed a broad portfolio of next generation small cell solutions for enterprise, metro and residential base stations. With over one million SoCs shipped to-date, Picochip says it is the most broadly deployed small cell semiconductor solution on the market.

“This marks the closing of the most strategic and exciting acquisition in Mindspeed’s history,” said Raouf Y. Halim, Mindspeed’s chief executive officer. “Mindspeed and Picochip are now one company that is well positioned to lead the market for small cell base station solutions for next generation mobile broadband communications. Our combination bolsters and accelerates our position in both 3G/high speed packet access (HSPA) and 4G/long-term evolution (LTE), and we believe we will have the number one market position in deployed small cell processors worldwide, with 70% market share in 3G/HSPA deployments.”

Mindspeed will host demonstrations and meetings for customers, partners, press and analysts at Mobile World Congress 2012 in booth 1E.57 at the Fira Montjuïc in Barcelona, Spain from February 27 to March 1, 2012 during its first public trade show presence since the completion of the acquisition. The company plans to introduce an expanded product line of base station SoC solutions as well as a compelling product roadmap that leverages the combined capabilities of Mindspeed and Picochip.

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Super dog: Bud Lights rescue dog Weego fetches Cocky Award

M&Ms "Ms. Brown" and Doritos "Man's Best Friend" commercials took second and third place respectively in the University of South Carolina poll, which took place during the Super Bowl at the studios of local NBC affiliate WIS-TV.

More than 100 students and faculty participated in the event, which is part of journalism professor Bonnie Drewniany's "Super Bowl Advertising" classes. The students critiqued the national ads that aired during Super Bowl XLVI for likeability, persuasiveness and brand identity.

The public weighed in through an online poll, also voting loveable Weego as its winner. Kia's "Extreme Dream Sequence," created by alumnus Justin Bajan, and the Chrysler Detroit ad, took the second and third spots in online voting.

Freshman Kirkland Gray of Rock Hill called the "Here, Weego" ad a winner.

"The commercial featured a scruffy dog that fetches Bud Light, a clever pun and a good cause [animal rescue]," said Gray. "We knew we had a winner."

Junior Stephen Bandstra of Sumter liked the ad's animal rescue message.

"Adorable dog plus a great cause equals a great ad," Bandstra said. "I was quite pleased that Bud Light is supporting the adoption of animals with an ad and is willing to place it in the Super Bowl."

Dustin Martin, a senior broadcast major from Gaffney, said the ad was his favorite.

"The winning ad 'Here, Weego, Bud Light' was compelling because it started with a bit of a surprise, and Bud Light was able to put their slogan 'Here We Go' in the commercial very creatively," Martin said. "The different drinking scenarios were well thought, with the dog getting single beers, six packs and even a keg for a group of people. It also was funny, which always helps a commercial."

Martin described this year's crop of ads as conservative.

"There were very few ads that were edgy or racy. There was also a slight lack of humor from some of the heavy hitters like Coca Cola, Pepsi and Budweiser," said Martin, who has changed the way he looks at ads as a result of the class. "It's interesting to see how they are strategically placed during the game. With having this class, I can appreciate the time, effort and money that goes into making Super Bowl ads."

Drewniany said the early release of some ads may have dampened their impact.

"So many commercials were released online before the Super Bowl that I think the ad game was a bit diluted this year. Our two top spots, however, weren't part of that pregame early-release frenzy," said Drewniany. "Bud Light found a clever way to reinforce its slogan, 'here we go.' Weego tugged at viewers' hearts and told the important story of helping rescue dogs."

Last year's winner was Volkswagen's "Darth Vader."

Drewniany will invite the creative team responsible for the Bud Light ad to campus to receive the award in April.

Every year, the winning advertising team has claimed the Cocky Award and shared with students the inside scoop on how the commercial was made.

Creative teams have claimed four Cockys for comedic Bud Light ads. 2010 marked the first time a consumer-created spot won the poll, with "Snack Attack Samurai" creator Cole Koehler claiming his prize.

Drewniany has studied Super Bowl advertising for 20 years and has taught the nation's only course on the subject for nine years. The School of Journalism and Mass Communications course, which covers advertising principles and the relationship between culture and advertising, includes the annual Ad Poll and Cocky Award.

This year Drewniany's course was expanded to include a large undergraduate section and an honors section.

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Why bad immunity genes survive: Study implicates arms race between genes and germs

"Major histocompatibility complex" (MHC) proteins are found on the surface of most cells in vertebrate animals. They distinguish self from foreign, and trigger an immune response against foreign invaders. MHCs recognize invading germs, reject or accept transplanted organs and play a role in helping us smell compatible mates.

"This study explains why there are so many versions of the MHC genes, and why the ones that cause susceptibility to diseases are being maintained and not eliminated," says biology Professor Wayne Potts. "They are involved in a never-ending arms race that causes them, at any point in time, to be good against some infections but bad against other infections and autoimmune diseases."

By allowing a disease virus to evolve rapidly in mice, the study produced new experimental evidence for the arms race between genes and germs -- known technically as "antagonistic coevolution." The findings will be published online the week of Feb. 6, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Potts, the senior author, ran the study with first author and former doctoral student Jason Kubinak, now a postdoctoral fellow in pathology. Other co-authors were biology doctoral student James Ruff, biology undergraduate C. Whitney Hyzer and Patricia Slev, a clinical assistant professor of pathology. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Theories for the Diversity of Immune-System MHC Genes

Most genes in humans and other vertebrate have only one or two "alleles," which are varieties or variants of a single gene. Although any given person carries no more than 12 varieties of the six human MHC genes, the human population has anywhere from hundreds to 2,300 varieties of each of the six human genes that produce MHC proteins.

"The mystery is why there are so many different versions of the same [MHC] genes in the human population," Kubinak says, especially because many people carry MHCs that make them susceptible to many pathogens (including the AIDS virus, malaria and hepatitis B and C) and autoimmune diseases (including type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, irritable bowel disease and ankylosing spondylitis).

Scientists have proposed three theories for why so many MHC gene variants exist in vertebrate animal populations (invertebrates don't have MHCs), and say all three likely are involved in maintaining the tremendous diversity of MHCs:

-- An organism with more MHC varieties has a better immune response than organisms with fewer varieties, so over time, organisms with more MHCs are more likely to survive. However, this theory cannot explain the full extent of MHC diversity.

-- Previous research indicates people and other animals are attracted to the smell of potential mates with MHCs that are "foreign" rather than "self." Parents with different MHC variants produce children with more MHCs and thus stronger immune systems.

-- Antagonistic coevolution between an organism and its pathogens. Kubinak says: "We have an organism and the microbes that infect it. Microbes evolve to better exploit the organism, and the organism evolves better defenses to fight off the infection. One theory to explain this great diversity in MHC genes is that those competing interests over time favor retaining more diversity."

The Arms Race between Germs and MHC Genes

"You naturally keep genes that fight disease," Kubinak says. "They help you survive, so those MHC genes become more common in the population over time because the people who carry them live to have offspring."

Pathogens -- disease-causing viruses, bacteria or parasites -- infect animals, which defend themselves with MHCs that recognize the invader and trigger an immune response to destroy the invading pathogen.

But over time, some pathogens mutate and evolve to become less recognizable by the MHCs and thus evade an immune response. As a result, the pathogens thrive. MHCs that lose the battle to germs become less common because they now predispose people who carry them to get sick and maybe die. It was thought such disease-susceptibility MHC genes eventually should vanish from the population, but they usually don't.

Why? While some of those MHCs do go extinct, others can persist, for two reasons. First, some of the now-rare MHCs gain an advantage because they no longer are targeted by evolving microbes, so they regain an ability to detect and fight the same germ that earlier defeated them -- after that germ mutates yet again. Second, some of the rare MHCs can mount an effective immune response against completely different microbes.

How the Study was Performed; Implications of the Findings

The researchers studied 60 mice that were genetically identical, except the mice were divided into three groups, each with a different variety of MHC genes known as b, d and k, respectively.

A mouse leukemia virus named the Friend virus was grown in tissue culture and used to infect two mice from each of the three MHC types. The fast-evolving retrovirus grew within the mice for 12 days, attacking, enlarging and replicating within the spleen and liver. Virus particles in the spleen were collected, and the severity of illness was measured by weighing the enlarged spleen.

Then, virus taken from each of the first three pairs of mice (b, d and k) was used to infect another three pair of mice with the same MHC types. The process was repeated until 10 pairs of mice in each MHC type were infected, allowing the virus time to mutate.

In this first experiment, the biologists showed they could get the Friend virus to adapt to and thus evade the MHC variants (b, d or k) in the mouse cells it attacked.

Next, the researchers showed that the virus adapted only to specific MHC proteins. For example, viruses that adapted to and sickened mice with the MHC type b protein still were attacked effectively in mice that had the type d and k MHCs.

In the third experiment, the researchers showed that pathogen fitness (measured by the number of virus particles in the spleen) correlated with pathogen virulence (as measured by spleen enlargement and thus weight). So the virus that evaded MHC type b made mice with that MHC sicker.

Together, the experiments demonstrate "the first step in the antagonistic coevolutionary dance" between a virus and MHC genes, Potts says.

Potts says the findings have some important implications:

-- The use of antibiotics to boost productivity in dairy herds and other livestock is a major reason human diseases increasingly resist antibiotics. Selective breeding for more milk and beef has reduced genetic diversity in livestock, including their MHCs. So breeding more MHCs back into herds could enhance their resistance to disease and thus reduce the need for antibiotics.

-- Because their populations are diminished, endangered species have less genetic diversity, making them an easier target for germs. Potts says it would be desirable to breed protective MHCs back into endangered species to bolster their disease defenses.

-- Genetic variation of MHCs in people and other organisms is important for limiting the evolution and spread of emerging diseases. In effect, Potts and colleagues created emerging diseases by making a virus evolve in mice. "It's a model to identify what things change in viruses to make them more virulent and thus an emerging disease."

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VC Kleiner Perkins launches engineering student fellowship

SAN FRANCISCO--Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins has announced the first class of recruits for its engineering internship program, which aims to place selected students in Kleiner-funded startups over the summer for work experience and mentoring.

The program, announced last year, attracted thousands of applications from over 100 universities in the United States, with just 25 picked from the crop for placement at Kleiner portfolio companies, including Klout, Path, Chegg, Nest, Zaarly, One Kings Lane, Opower, Flipboard, Crittercism, Nebula, Zynga and Shopkick.

The initiative is supposed to give smaller startups access to affordable raw engineering talent, difficult in an area where big players like Google, Apple, Facebook and others can outbid smaller outfits to acquire the talent they want. It will also afford the engineering students work experience at some of the most cutting edge startup companies in the area, and valuable networking opportunities, with a seal of approval from Kleiner Perkins to add to their resume.

The fellowship students also get paid at what Kleiner calls a “competitive” rate.

“The caliber of students who applied to our program was extremely high, making the selection process very difficult,” said Kleiner Perkins, on the program’s website.

Despite the thousands of applications, however, only one female engineer made the cut to Kleiner’s fellowship program. Kleiner Perkins would not comment on the gender discrepancy when asked.
VC Kleiner Perkins launches engineering student fellowship

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Exercise triggers stem cells in muscle

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in skeletal muscle have been known to be important for muscle repair in response to non-physiological injury, predominantly in response to chemical injections that significantly damage muscle tissue and induce inflammation. The researchers, led by kinesiology and community health professor Marni Boppart, investigated whether MSCs also responded to strain during exercise, and if so, how.

"Since exercise can induce some injury as part of the remodeling process following mechanical strain, we wondered if MSC accumulation was a natural response to exercise and whether these cells contributed to the beneficial regeneration and growth process that occurs post-exercise," said Boppart, who also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I.

The researchers found that MSCs in muscle are very responsive to mechanical strain. They witnessed MSC accumulation in muscle of mice after vigorous exercise. Then, they determined that although MSCs don't directly contribute to building new muscle fibers, they release growth factors that spur other cells in muscle to fuse and generate new muscle, providing the cellular basis for enhanced muscle health following exercise.

A key element to the Illinois team's method was in exercising the mice before isolating the cells to trigger secretion of beneficial growth factors. Then, they dyed the cells with a fluorescent marker and injected them into other mice to see how MSCs coordinated with other muscle-building cells.

In addition to examining the cells in vivo, the researchers studied the cells' response to strain on different substrates. They found that MSC response is very sensitive to the mechanical environment, indicating that conditions of muscle strain affect the cells' activity.

"These findings are important because we've identified an adult stem cell in muscle that may provide the basis for muscle health with exercise and enhanced muscle healing with rehabilitation/movement therapy," Boppart said. "The fact that MSCs in muscle have the potential to release high concentrations of growth factor into the circulatory system during exercise also makes us wonder if they provide a critical link between enhanced whole-body health and participation in routine physical activity."

Next, the group hopes to determine whether these cells contribute to the decline in muscle mass over a person's lifetime. Preliminary data suggest MSCs become deficient in muscle with age. The team hopes to develop a combinatorial therapy that utilizes molecular and stem-cell-based strategies to prevent age-related muscle loss.

"Although exercise is the best strategy for preserving muscle as we age, some individuals are just not able to effectively engage in physical activity," Boppart said. "Disabilities can limit opportunities for muscle growth. We're working hard to understand how we can best utilize these cells effectively to preserve muscle mass in the face of atrophy."

The team published its findings in the journal PLoS One. The Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute, the Ellison Medical Foundation and the Mary Jane Neer Foundation supported this work.

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Researchers develop novel form of hafnium oxide

LONDON – Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a novel form of hafnium oxide, a compound used at the leading-edge of integrated circuit production and being investigated for use in novel non-volatile memory prototypes.

The university is now looking for partners to help it make money from licensing companies to use the material.

A research team working under Andrew Flewitt in the Department of Engineering at the university has developed a novel form of hafnium oxide (HfO2) with a dielectric constant higher than 30 compared with the conventional value of 20 to 25 for amorphous and crystalline forms of the compound. The novel form of the material is expected to find use in plastic electronics, high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, optical coatings and for the creation of more efficient solar cells.

Hafnium oxide is best known for its use in high-K metal gate (HKMG) stacks within the transistors of nanoelectronic manufacturing processes. The increased dielectric constant should enable further device miniaturization as well as opening up possibilities for next generation electronic and optoelectronic devices, the research group said.



Andrew Flewitt with higher-k hafnium oxide film

The key to progress made by Flewitt and his team is the adoption of a refinement of conventional sputtering called as HiTUS (High Target Utilization Sputtering). The material is produced using a room-temperature, high-deposition rate process, making it suitable for plastic electronics and high-volume semiconductor manufacturing.

Metal oxides are usually produced on substrates by sputtering, a process by which some of the atoms of an electrode are ejected as a result of bombardment by heavy positive ions. However, it is difficult to control precisely the energy of the deposition process, and hence the material properties such as defect density.

The use of HiTUS has allowed the creation of alternative amorphous form of hafnium oxide, according to the research team, with a higher dielectric constant than the previously known form.

Hafnium oxide forms in a number of different crystalline and polycrystalline structures: monoclinic, cubic and orthorhombic. However, for electronics work amorphous hafnium oxide is desirable as polycrystalline grain boundaries act as conduction paths through the material and reduce the resistivity. Until now amorphous hafnium oxide has had dielectric constant of around 20.

"Most people thought that all amorphous hafnium oxide had to exist in the monoclinic-like phase," said Flewitt, in a statement. "What we've shown is that it can exist and does exist in a cubic-like phase. This is similar to amorphous carbon, where you can get diamond-like properties out of amorphous carbon material."

Amorphous dielectrics are more homogenous than other forms, allowing improved uniformity from one device to another, and the absence of grain boundaries results in higher effective resistivity, as well as less optical scatter.

Cambridge Enterprise, the University's commercialization group, said it is seeking partners for collaborative development and licensing of the material.


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Researchers develop novel form of hafnium oxide

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Patterns in sand dunes explained

The study was conducted by Douglas Jerolmack, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science; postdoctoral researcher Federico Falcini; graduate students Raleigh Martin, Colin Phillips and Meredith Reitz; and undergraduate researcher Claire Masteller. The Penn researchers also collaborated with Ryan Ewing of the University of Alabama and Ilya Buynevich of Temple University.

Their paper was published in Nature Geoscience.

Much of the study's data was collected during field trips taken by students in an undergraduate and graduate course Jerolmack teaches at Penn, Geology 305: Earth Systems Processes. Each year, the class has traveled to White Sands to do fieldwork during spring break.

"It's a magnificent place to go, and one of the reasons I take my students there is really because it's so visually striking and compelling," Jerolmack said. "I want it to be memorable for them."

White Sands National Monument, located near Alamogordo in south-central New Mexico, is an enclosed basin that housed an ancient lake during the last ice age. Unlike most dune fields, which are composed of quartz sand, it's the world's largest dune field made of gypsum. Its blindingly white dunes cover 275 square miles.

The dune fields' groundwater table is located just a meter below the surface.

"So it means you're in a very hot arid place, but when you walk around you feel moisture on your feet," Jerolmack said.

The moisture creates a somewhat "sticky" surface, he added, "so, if the sand blows off a dune and lands, it sticks to the surface and can get deposited and left behind."

White Sands has long been the site of geologic inquiry. Scientists have put forward theories to explain individual elements of the dunes, including their shape, their movements over time and the presence or absence of plants. The novelty of this study lies in showing how all of these problems are a consequence of the interaction of wind with the dunes.

While the majority of Jerolmack's work examines how water moves sediment, wind becomes the dominant shaping force in deserts.

The researchers began by analyzing high-resolution elevation maps, measured each year for five years using aerial laser scans of the dune field surface. These data showed that dunes migrated fastest at the upwind (western) edge of the dune field, where the field transitioned into a flat and barren plain. Moving along the prevailing wind direction (northeast) into the dune field, the speed of the moving dunes consistently slowed down. The researchers reasoned that the friction resulting from the dunes was likely causing the wind to slow down over the dune field. They employed a simple theory to provide quantitative confirmation of this idea, demonstrating that aerodynamics was the cause of the dune migration pattern.

Small specks in the high-resolution images, which indicate where plants grow, also showed that the wind and dune migration activity appeared to impact vegetative growth. "There is a rapid transition from bare dunes to dunes that are almost entirely covered with vegetation," said Jerolmack. "We recognized that this transition occurs because the dunes are slowing down, and slowing down, and slowing down; eventually the dunes are moving so slowly that plants can grow on them."

According to the researchers' observations, dunes that are hit with stronger winds have fewer plants, as the plants cannot grow roots quickly enough to keep up with the shifting sands. By contrast, the dunes that experience the slower-moving winds are stable enough to support plants.

The plants then exert their own influence on dune shapes, as their root systems help stabilize the sand in which they grow. Because plants generally take hold first to a dunes' "horns" -- the narrow slopes of boomerang-shaped dunes -- before reaching the center, the researchers observed that dunes with plant-stabilized horns inverted as the wind blew the center inside out.

Where plants grew, the underlying groundwater was fresher and farther below the surface than areas bare of plants. The Penn researchers demonstrated that plants impacted the groundwater, rather than the other way around. By taking up water, the plants draw the groundwater table down. This also lowers the evaporation at the groundwater table, leaving the groundwater less salty than in unvegetated areas with high evaporation rates.

"What makes this so interesting is that, by understanding the changes in the wind pattern over the dunes, we can also understand the migration of the dunes, the plant and groundwater dynamics and even the long term deposition rate within the dune field," Jerolmack said. "This helps us to understand very well what's going on at White Sands, but these are all fundamental mechanisms that we think can apply in many other places."

North-central Nebraska's Sand Hills, located on a grass-stabilized dune field, is one example where this mechanism may apply. Under some climate change predictions, rainfall could decline in the upper Midwest. Even a small reduction in rainwater could mean that the grasses that stabilize the Sand Hills' dunes would no longer be able to survive. The dunes would then go back to being a barren migrating dune field, no longer serving the half-a-million cattle that now graze there.

"It happened during the Dust Bowl and it could happen again," Jerolmack said.

The study was supported by the University of Pennsylvania, the National Science Foundation and the National Park Service.

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Copper + love chemical = big sulfur stink

But the research has led scientists at Duke University Medical Center and the University of Albany to the discovery that it's the copper in our bodies that makes mammals recoil from sulfurous chemical smells.

Working with Eric Block, PhD, the Carla Rizzo Delray Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Albany, the team looked at reasons why mammals, including people, can detect even trace amounts of sulfur-containing substances, like MTMT.

"While we were doing our experiments, on even very dilute specimens of MTMT, our neighbors on the lab hallway complained," Matsunami said with a laugh. He is an associate professor in the Duke Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and the Department of Neurobiology.

The Duke laboratory ran a high-throughput test of several hundred mammalian odor receptors, and found that one receptor that bound copper ions resulted in superior detection of even trace amounts of sulfur.

Underarm odors from bacteria, skunk spray, volcanic gases and odorized natural gas (for leak detection) are examples of sulfurous substances.

The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online the week of Feb. 6.

"We learned that copper was the metal that allowed for detection of all the sulfur-containing compounds we tested, and it was Eric Block's idea that metal ions must be involved," Matsunami said. "Further, I see no reason why the mouse receptor activity would be different from human receptors, because we have the same kind of olfactory receptors."

Block and colleagues created several dozen sulfur-containing compounds for testing.

The odor impact of the sulfur-containing molecule MTMT can be attenuated by manipulating the copper concentration in the nasal mucus. The team did experiments using a chemical that binds to copper in the mouse nose, so that copper wasn't available to the receptors, and the mice didn't detect the MTMT, Matsunami said.

"This study establishes for the first time the key role of a metal, namely copper, in the activity of an olfactory receptor," Eric Block said. "What's also exciting is that, because olfactory receptors are transmembrane G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) of the same type as receptors for drugs, our discovery suggests a possibility that some drug-receptor responses may also be enhanced in the presence of copper or other metal ions."

Other authors include Siji Thomas and Shaozhong Zhang, of the University of Albany Department of Chemistry; Timothy Connelly, Qiuyi Chi and Minghong Ma of the Department of Neurobiology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; and Xufang Duan, Zhen Li, Lifang Wu, Guo-Qiang Chen and Hanyi Zhuang, all of the Ruijin Hospital in China. The senior authors on the paper were Dr. Matsunami and Dr. Zhuang, formerly of Duke, who is also with the Institute of Health Sciences, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai.

This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants, Shanghai Pujiang Program Grant, the Program for Innovative Research Team of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission grant from the Chen Guang Project funded by Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and Shanghai Education Development Foundation, and a grant from the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning, from the Leading Academic Discipline Project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Basic Research Program of China, U.S. National Science Foundation, and NIH/National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders also funded the work.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Lawrence C. Katz of Duke, who worked on related studies and with Eric Block found the first evidence of neurons that respond to social odors.

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Fossil cricket reveals Jurassic love song

Some 165 million years ago, the world was host to a diversity of sounds. Primitive bushcrickets and croaking amphibians were among the first animals to produce loud sounds by stridulation (rubbing certain body parts together). Modern-day bushcrickets -- also known as katydids -- produce mating calls by rubbing a row of teeth on one wing against a plectrum on the other wing but how their primitive ancestors produced sound and what their songs actually sounded like was unknown -- until now.

On discovering several insect fossils, a group of Chinese palaeontologists, with Jun-Jie Gu and Professor Dong Ren from the Capital Normal University in Beijing, contacted Dr Fernando Montealegre-Zapata and Professor Daniel Robert, both experts in the biomechanics of singing and hearing in insects, in Bristol's School of Biological Sciences. The group also teamed up with Dr Michael Engel of the University of Kansas, USA, a leading expert on insect evolution.

The Chinese researchers provided an exceptionally detailed bushcricket fossil from the Mid Jurassic period. The specimen had such well-preserved wing features that the details of its stridulating organs were clearly visible under an optical microscope. Such information has never been obtained before from insect fossils. It was identified as a new fossil species and named Archaboilus musicus by the Beijing-Kansas team.

Dr Montealegre-Z and Professor Robert examined the anatomical construction of the fossil's song apparatus, and compared it to 59 living bushcricket species. They concluded that this animal must have produced musical songs, broadcasting pure, single frequencies.

Professor Robert said: "This discovery indicates that pure tone communication was already exploited by animals in the middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago. For Archaboilus, as for living bushcricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction. Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to -- or not. Using a single tone, the male's call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females. However, it also makes the male more conspicuous to predators if they have also evolved ears to eavesdrop on these mating calls."

The research, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, implies that the acoustic environment was already quite busy 165 million years ago with many animals (such as amphibians and other arthropods) singing at the same time, possibly chorusing, within the additional background noise produced by waterfalls, streams and wind.

Amazingly, based on the detailed morphology of Archaboilus' wings, Dr Fernando Montealegre-Z could reconstruct the songs emitted by these ancient insects.

Following biomechanical principles that he discovered some years ago, Dr Montealegre-Z established that A. musicus sang a tone pitched at 6.4kHz and that every bout of singing lasted 16 milliseconds. This turned out to be enough information to acoustically reconstruct the song itself, possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date.

This paleobioacoustical analysis also provides a unique insight into the ecology of an extinct insect.

Dr Montealegre-Z said: "Using a low-pitched song, A. musicus was acoustically adapted to long-distance communication in a lightly cluttered environment, such as a Jurassic forest. Today, all species of katydids that use musical calls are nocturnal so musical calls in the Jurassic were also most likely an adaptation to nocturnal life. Being nocturnal, Archaboilus musicus probably escaped from diurnal predators like Archaeopterix, but it cannot be ruled out that Jurassic insectivorous mammals like Morganucodon and Dryolestes also listened to the calls of Archaboilus and preyed on them.

"This Jurassic bushcricket thus sheds light on the potential auditory capacity of other animals, and helps us learn a little more about the ambiance of a world long gone. It also suggests the evolutionary mechanisms that drove modern bushcrickets to develop ultrasonic signals for sexual pairing and for avoiding an increasingly relevant echolocating predator, but that only happened 100 million years later, possibly with the appearance of bats."

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Google poaches Apple exec

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Seemingly putting to rest any rumored “no poaching” agreement between Silicon Valley’s tech giants, Google has hired away a senior Apple director for work on a secret project.

According to VentureBeat, Google hired Simon Prakash, senior director of product integrity, and an Apple staffer for over eight years, to work on a project purportedly being headed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin himself. Before his employment at Apple, Prakash was director of engineering design validation at Cielo Communications and prior to that, a reliability and field applications manager at 3Com.

Though it isn’t known what Prakash will be working on at Google, his previous experience was in quality control for all Apple products, raising speculation that he may be destined to oversee any Google hardware projects currently in the works. Last year, Google bought Motorola Mobility, prompting rumors that the firm would start building its own hardware.



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How to Tell Designer Handbags from Replica Handbags (Part One) Fashion Designer

Some females will not mind buying replica handbags although some women really like only designer handbags. To them, how to tell designer handbags from replica handbags is crucial.

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Another good indicator of a real or fake handbag is the packaging.  Counterfeit bags are often purchased without having those protective bags, tissues, or boxes surrounding them.  Accurate designer bags are typically sold in gorgeous wrapping.  Also, a lot of designers will set their special bags in a plastic cover that is not to be removed until the bag is ready to be worn.  If your bag does not come with such a cover, be wary of its actuality.  Both of these tactics will be hard to do if the bag is not yours, and you have no way of seeing how considerably was spent on it or if it came beautifully packaged.

If you are attempting to spot handbags replica on other individuals, there are other clues we can look for. Checking to see what type of label the bag has is a very good way to be able to tell if it is a fraud. True designer handbags normally have the designer label on the inside. Right along with the label is the tag indicating where it was produced. Most designer bags are created in Italy or France.

An additional way to tell if your designer handbag is a fake is by seeking at the bag for anything distinct. For example, if any of the letters, monograms, or numbers emblazoned on the bag is slightly various at all, then you can bet it is a replica handbag. For example, if you are seeking at a Coach bag that bears the signature “C” all over it, you will know it is not genuine if the “C’s” are misaligned, or if the pattern of the “C’s” do not match up where there are pockets or folds.  You really should not have paid into the hundreds for your Coach handbag if the patterns are crooked and the stitching is wrong.  This is not only true for Coach bags, but all designer handbags. If the stitching and the seams are sloppy then you can bet that the handiwork on this bag is not actual.

Write-up source: On the web New Style, fashion Life and Jewelry Talk.

How to Tell Designer Handbags from Replica Handbags (Part One) Fashion Designer

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Dell Desktop Computer Testimonials

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Dell Desktop Computer Testimonials

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New means for creating elastic conductors

"We're optimistic that this new approach could lead to large-scale production of stretchable conductors, which would then expedite research and development of elastic electronic devices," says Dr. Yong Zhu, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, and lead author of a paper describing the new technique.

Stretchable electronic devices would be both more resilient and able to conform to various shapes. Potential applications include devices that can be incorporated into clothing, implantable medical devices, and sensors that can be stretched over unmanned aerial vehicles.

To develop these stretchable electronics, one needs to create conductors that are elastic and will reliably transmit electric signals regardless of whether they are being stretched.

One way of making conductive materials more elastic is to "buckle" them. Zhu's new method buckles carbon nanotubes on the plane of the substrate. Think of the nanotubes as forming squiggly lines on a piece of paper, rather than an accordion shape that zigs up and down with only the bottom parts touching the sheet of paper. Zhu's team used carbon nanotubes because they are sturdy, stable, excellent conductors and can be aligned into ribbons.

The new process begins by placing aligned carbon nanotubes on an elastic substrate using a transfer printing process. The substrate is then stretched, which separates the nanotubes while maintaining their parallel alignment.

Strikingly, when the substrate is relaxed, the nanotubes do not return to their original positions. Instead, the nanotubes buckle -- creating what looks like a collection of parallel squiggly lines on a flat surface.

The carbon nanotubes are now elastic -- they can be stretched -- but they have retained their electrical properties.

The key benefit of this new method is that it will make manufacturing of elastic conductors significantly more efficient, because the carbon nanotubes can be applied before the substrate is stretched. This is compatible with existing manufacturing processes. "For example, roll-to-roll printing techniques could be adapted to take advantage of our new method," Zhu says.

A paper describing the new approach, "Buckling of Aligned Carbon Nanotubes as Stretchable Conductors: A New Manufacturing Strategy," was published online Jan. 23 in Advanced Materials. The paper was co-authored by Feng Xu, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

In another new paper, Zhu's team has demonstrated for the first time that carbon nanotubes can be buckled using a technique in which the elastic substrate is stretched before the nanotubes are applied. The substrate is then relaxed, forcing the nanotubes to buckle out of plane. The nanotubes form a ribbon that curves up and down like the bellows of an accordion. This second technique has been used before with other materials. This second paper, "Wavy Ribbons of Carbon Nanotubes for Stretchable Conductors," was published Jan. 19 in Advanced Functional Materials.

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Azuki legumi: ad esempio prepararli e piatti

I dietologhi conoscono che gli azuki legumi e ricette connesse sono cioe’ dei minuscoli fagioli: semi di colore rosso bruno di una varieta’ specifica di soia.

Sono coltivati tanto nei paesi dell’est, molto in Giappone, in cui sono forniti nella realizzazione di piatti, ora hanno esteso il loro credo anche in altre fasce del mondo per il loro utilizzo nelle diete macrobiotiche.

Nei negozi si trovano seccati e sono preparati esattamente ad esempio comuni fagioli.

Sono indicati in sintomi di fatica, ipertensione, arteriosclerosi e tensione e hanno proprieta’ depurative e energetici mentre sono non indicati in situazioni di fistola.

Azuki legumi: ad esempio prepararli e piatti

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Development of worlds first functional polymer nanowire fabrication technology by pulsed laser irradiation

Polymer nanowires have important advantages for industrial applications in comparison with nanowires made from inorganic materials. Because they are extremely flexible and are also optically transparent, wide application is expected in new nanodevice fields such as sensors, light-emitting devices, optical switch devices, and others. However, it had not been possible to solve two problems which were obstacles to practical application of nanodevices using polymer nanowires. One was the need to substantially reduce the size of the nanowire, and the other was addition of various dopants to impart new functions. In the present work, the NIMS researchers proposed an extremely simple method using only a pulsed laser, which is completely different from the conventional fabrication method, and simultaneously solved the above-mentioned two problems.

Nanodevices have attracted attention because new functions that were not possible with conventional devices can be obtained by utilizing the quantum size effect, which is first manifested when the size of a device is reduced to its ultimate limit. In order to obtain the quantum size effect, it is necessary to refine the diameter of nanowires down to several 10nm or less. Molds are used in the conventional nanowire fabrication technique, but fabrication by this method had been limited to comparatively thick wires with diameters of several 100nm. Furthermore, with the conventional technique, polymer nanowires were extracted from the mold by etching (dissolving) the mold with a strong chemical agent, and it was only possible to use polymers that would not be damaged by the chemical.

In this pioneering research, the NIMS team developed a completely new technique, which is the world's first of its kind, by simply irradiating a highly-controlled laser on the material without using a mold, thereby causing a nanowire to form at the position of irradiation as though growing. It was also possible to impart diverse functions to the formed nanowires, which had been difficult until now, by adding various dopants to the starting material.

Because this newly-developed functional polymer nanowire fabrication technique can be applied to arbitrary functional nanomaterials and diverse polymers as necessary, practical application of the functional polymer materials obtained by this method is expected in the future in fields such as wiring for flexible substrates of smart phones, where increasingly active development is anticipated, and in flexible high magnetic permeability materials in antennas for portable electronic devices, where miniaturization is required.

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Placebos and distraction: New study shows how to boost the power of pain relief, without drugs

Now a new study challenges the theory that the placebo effect is a high-level cognitive function. The authors -- Jason T. Buhle, Bradford L. Stevens, and Jonathan J. Friedman of Columbia University and Tor D. Wager of the University of Colorado Boulder -- reduced pain in two ways -- either by giving them a placebo, or a difficult memory task. lacebo. But when they put the two together, "the level of pain reduction that people experienced added up. There was no interference between them," says Buhle. "That suggests they rely on separate mechanisms." The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, could help clinicians maximize pain relief without drugs.

In the study, 33 participants came in for three separate sessions. In the first, experimenters applied heat to the skin with a little metal plate and calibrated each individual's pain perceptions. In the second session, some of the people applied an ordinary skin cream they were told was a powerful but safe analgesic. The others put on what they were told was a regular hand cream. In the placebo-only trials, participants stared at a cross on the screen and rated the pain of numerous applications of heat -- the same level, though they were told it varied. For other trials they performed a tough memory task -- distraction and placebo simultaneously. For the third session, those who'd had the plain cream got the "analgesic" and vice versa. The procedure was the same.

The results: With either the memory task or the placebo alone, participants felt less pain than during the trials when they just stared at the cross. Together, the two effects added up; they didn't interact or interfere with each other. The data suggest that the placebo effect does not require executive attention or working memory.

So what about that neuroimaging? "Neuroimaging is great," says Buhle, "but because each brain region does many things, when you see activation in a particular area, you don't know what cognitive process is driving it." This study tested the theory about how placebos work with direct behavioral observation.

The findings are promising for pain relief. Clinicians use both placebos and distraction -- for instance, virtual reality in burn units. But they weren't sure if one might diminish the other's efficacy. "This study shows you can use them together," says Buhle, "and get the maximum bang for your buck without medications."

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Graphene electronics moves into a third dimension

In a paper recently published in Science, a Manchester team lead by Nobel laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Konstantin Novoselov has literally opened a third dimension in graphene research. Their research shows a transistor that may prove the missing link for graphene to become the next silicon.

Graphene -- one atomic plane of carbon -- is a remarkable material with endless unique properties, from electronic to chemical and from optical to mechanical.

One of many potential applications of graphene is its use as the basic material for computer chips instead of silicon. This potential has alerted the attention of major chip manufactures, including IBM, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Intel. Individual transistors with very high frequencies (up to 300 GHz) have already been demonstrated by several groups worldwide.

Unfortunately, those transistors cannot be packed densely in a computer chip because they leak too much current, even in the most insulating state of graphene. This electric current would cause chips to melt within a fraction of a second.

This problem has been around since 2004 when the Manchester researchers reported their Nobel-winning graphene findings and, despite a huge worldwide effort to solve it since then, no real solution has so far been offered.

The University of Manchester scientists now suggest using graphene not laterally (in plane) -- as all the previous studies did -- but in the vertical direction. They used graphene as an electrode from which electrons tunnelled through a dielectric into another metal. This is called a tunnelling diode.

Then they exploited a truly unique feature of graphene -- that an external voltage can strongly change the energy of tunnelling electrons. As a result they got a new type of a device -- vertical field-effect tunnelling transistor in which graphene is a critical ingredient.

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, who spearheaded the experimental effort, said: "We have proved a conceptually new approach to graphene electronics. Our transistors already work pretty well. I believe they can be improved much further, scaled down to nanometre sizes and work at sub-THz frequencies."

"It is a new vista for graphene research and chances for graphene-based electronics never looked better than they are now," adds Professor Novoselov.

Graphene alone would not be enough to make the breakthrough. Fortunately, there are many other materials, which are only one atom or one molecule thick, and they were used for help.

The Manchester team made the transistors by combining graphene together with atomic planes of boron nitride and molybdenum disulfide. The transistors were assembled layer by layer in a desired sequence, like a layer cake but on an atomic scale.

Such layer-cake superstructures do not exist in nature. It is an entirely new concept introduced in the report by the Manchester researchers. The atomic-scale assembly offers many new degrees of functionality, without some of which the tunnelling transistor would be impossible.

"The demonstrated transistor is important but the concept of atomic layer assembly is probably even more important," explains Professor Geim. Professor Novoselov added: "Tunnelling transistor is just one example of the inexhaustible collection of layered structures and novel devices which can now be created by such assembly.

"It really offers endless opportunities both for fundamental physics and for applications. Other possible examples include light emission diodes, photovoltaic devices, and so on."

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New 'biopsy in a blood test' to detect cancer

"It's a next-generation technology," said Scripps Research Associate Professor Peter Kuhn, PhD, senior investigator of the new studies and primary inventor of the high-definition blood test. "It significantly boosts our ability to monitor, predict, and understand cancer progression, including metastasis, which is the major cause of death for cancer patients."

The studies were published February 3, 2012, in the journal Physical Biology.

The new test, called HD-CTC, labels cells in a patient's blood sample in a way that distinguishes possible CTCs from ordinary red and white blood cells. It then uses a digital microscope and an image-processing algorithm to isolate the suspect cells with sizes and shapes ("morphologies") unlike those of healthy cells. Just as in a surgical biopsy, a pathologist can examine the images of the suspected CTCs to eliminate false positives and note their morphologies.

Kuhn emphasizes that this basic setup can be easily modified with different cell-labeling and image-processing techniques.

Five New Studies, Five Steps Forward

To test the new technology, members of the Kuhn lab at Scripps Research teamed up with pathologists and oncologists at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California; UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego; the Billings Clinic in Billings, Montana; the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco; the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles; and the Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The five new studies that resulted from the collaboration not only demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the new test for a number of different cancer types, but also begin to explore the utility of the technology for diagnosing and monitoring patients and improving cancer research in the lab. While other tests for CTCs typically use "enrichment" steps in which suspected CTCs are concentrated -- and these methods inadvertently exclude some types of CTCs -- the new studies show HD-CTC works well as a no-cell-left-behind process and enables a more complete analysis.

Also striking is the quality of the images. "The high definition method gives a detailed portrait of these elusive cells that are caught in the act of spreading around the body," said diagnostic pathologist Kelly Bethel, MD, of Scripps Health, Scripps Research, and UC San Diego School of Medicine, who is the senior clinical investigator on Kuhn's team. "It's unprecedented -- we've never been able to see them routinely and in high definition like this before."

In the first study, the research team examined 83 advanced cancer patients using HD-CTC to document the test's sensitivity and accuracy for different cancer types. The scientists found that the test detected five or more CTCs per milliliter of blood in 80 percent of patients with metastatic prostate cancer, 70 percent of those with metastatic breast cancer, 50 percent of those with metastatic pancreatic cancer, and no healthy subjects. The current gold-standard CTC test, known as CellSearch, was notably less sensitive in detecting tumor cells in these samples.

Most patients whose CTC counts surpassed the detection threshold also showed small aggregates of CTCs, which cancer biologists term "microtumor emboli." These are widely suspected to be incipient metastatic tumors, as well as triggers for the blood clots that often kill advanced cancer patients. In the second study, the scientists showed that HD-CTC could detect these aggregates in 43 percent of 71 patients with advanced prostate, lung, pancreas, and breast cancers, and in none of a group of 15 healthy subjects. "This tells us that HD-CTC could be helpful in studying the origins of cancer metastases and related blood clots, and for predicting them, too," Kuhn said.

In the third study, the team used HD-CTC to compare circulating tumor cells from prostate cancer patients with cells from prostate cancer cell lines that researchers often use as convenient models for prostate cancer biology in the lab. The team found significant differences between the two classes of cells, in their cell morphology and in the way they were labeled by HD-CTC's fluorescent tags. "This underscores the need for studying cancer cells from patients, not just model cancer cells that in some ways may be utterly different from the real thing," Kuhn said.

In the fourth study, the researchers performed HD-CTC tests on 28 patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer over periods of up to a year. The team was able to detect CTCs in 68 percent of samples, and found that the numbers of detected CTCs tended to go up as other measures showed cancer progression.

In the fifth and final paper of the series, the team used HD-CTC in 78 patients who had just been diagnosed with various stages of non-small-cell lung cancer. "We demonstrated that we could sensitively detect CTCs even in patients with early-stage cancer," Kuhn said.

This result points to the possibility of using the HD-CTC blood test not only to evaluate already-diagnosed cancer, but also to help detect cancer in people who are unaware they have it. "If HD-CTC works on the day after cancer diagnosis, as we've shown, then one can easily imagine that it would work the day before diagnosis, too," Kuhn said.

Kuhn and his colleagues now intend to study the use of HD-CTC as a potential screening test and to develop it further for use in clinical monitoring and cancer research. Kuhn has founded a San Diego-based biotechnology company, Epic Sciences, Inc., to develop HD-CTC commercially for companion diagnostic products in personalized cancer care.

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